


with a graveyard tan

by 1001cranes



Series: 2k18 WIP Amnesty [1]
Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Alpha/Omega, F/M, sex around the edges
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-15
Updated: 2018-01-15
Packaged: 2019-03-05 01:04:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13376841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/1001cranes/pseuds/1001cranes
Summary: The only thing worse than an Omega would be an Omega Furiosa has to break.





	with a graveyard tan

**Author's Note:**

> i found half a gem in my google drive this afternoon, so I polished it a bit and here we are.

“For you, my Imperator,” Immortan Joe says. He waves a hand and one of the War Boys drags an Omega forward - collared, masked, on a leash, biting and clawing at the air.

Furiosa goes cold. The only thing worse than an Omega would be an Omega she has to break. But she inclines her head deeply, shading her eyes. This is a sign of favor. One she’s earned, and that is a step forward.

“He is willful!” Joe continues, sonorous around the clicking of his mask. “Nearly feral! But I have no doubt you will command his respect soon enough.”

Even the heavy lines of the mask cannot hide the way his eyes dart around the room, and the jerky tremors in his limbs show the shock collar has been recently used. His hair and face are newly shorn, the area around his jaw shades lighter than the skin on his arms. A wanderer, she thinks, a road warrior, not tribute or something stolen. But his mouth is plush, his face is soft and pretty in way that cannot pass for Beta. He’s strong to have made it this far alone, and rather beautiful, really. Beautiful enough to have been passed to someone else, to fetch a price -- and instead he is hers.

Shit.

| |

In a place like the Citadel Omegas are a luxury. The pretty and fertile are of course kept for Immortan Joe; the pretty but infertile sold to the whorehouses, and the less pretty are consigned to breeding. Those few who outlive their fertility or looks help the milk mothers or work elsewhere in the citadel.

Omegas are coddled, or so most believe. The wives, the breeders, the milkers. They are fed and watered, kept free from violence and disease, and some would consider that a bargain they have the better side of. But a bargain made over your head without your consent is not bargain at all, Furiosa knows.

| |

There is a moment where she thinks of asking for his mask to be removed. The collar is out of the question: an Imperator would not ask. But perhaps the mask….

In her time at the Citadel Furiosa has been complicit in many things. She has cause suffering. She has killed. She tried to draw lines, but they were set only in sand and disappeared with the changing wind. There is no innocence left in her, and likely there is little in the Omega, but she wonders at redeeming a piece of her soul on the price of a man's suffering.

“He’s almost too pretty to stay muzzled,” she says, and the others laugh uproariously. She’s supposes it’s lucky he didn’t come to her with a chastity belt.

He tries to bite her fingers. The War Boys hoot and holler; there are plenty of crude intimations about how she should use her metal hand.

The Omega still _says_ nothing, not to bargain or beg or plead, not to ingratiate or anger. It occurs that ‘feral’ might not have been far off the mark. Alphas can survive alone, though they might go berserk once they find others, and Betas are hardy. Omegas are more delicate. They go out of their heads during heats, it's said, and who knows how long this one has been alone. He smells only of dust.

The walk to Furiosa's rooms isn't long. Her own space. She could have something higher up in the Citadel, but she keeps close to the rig, on the other side from where the War Boys bunk.

“What’s your name?” she asks.

She's not particularly surprised when he doesn't answer.

“I have to call you something.”

Silence, still.

“Fine. I'll call you Fool.”

She undresses, and even though she has deliberately turned her back to him, she can feel how tense he’s become. It sits in the very ends of her spine.

“Sleep on the floor,” she tells him. She’s earned the damn bed.

| |

He attacks in the night, as she expects. She wakes up when the moon is highest, a few minutes before he moves. Almost prescient. The city below still howls, even in the nighttime, but the only sound in the room is their breathing. Deep and even.

He’s found the knife she keeps under the bed, which would be more alarming if she didn’t have another two tucked under her pillow and strapped behind the headboard.

The fight is short and brutal. Furiosa has the advantage of using her metal arm to deflect the knife, not to mention actual surprise. They might be near equal in strength on a good day, but it is not a good day for Fool. She has him pinned between the floor and the bed within minutes.

 _I am not your enemy_ , she wants to tell him, but she has spent decades becoming that which conquered her. _I won’t hurt you_ , but that isn’t likely true either. Someone has to hurt him. That’s the price of being in this world. Something has to hurt.

“This wasn’t my idea,” she says finally. He’s still under her, still like an animal pressed into a corner, eyes wide and mouth frothing. She isn’t sure he even hears her. "I didn't ask for you. I don't want an Omega.”

Still, he says nothing. He does nothing. Limbs quivering.

“There’s nowhere to go,” she continues. Firm. Gentle. “You’d never make it out of the Citadel. No supplies. No car. Murdering me only gets you passed off to someone worse.”

She gets back in bed.

| |

She does wake up in the morning. 

She has bruises on her arms, and Fool has scratches on back and cuts on his hands, but that only helps.

| |

She brings up a plate of noon meal for him, and a file. He’s found the other weapons, she notes. Moved at least some of them. Feral, maybe, but not stupid. Not going to be any less of a problem.

She sets the file on the table alongside the plate.

“If you want that thing off your face,” she tells him, and walks back out, headed to the kitchens. She isn’t halfway down the hall before the frantic sound of sawing follows her.

| |

One of the War Boys’ raiding parties stole Furiosa when she was a child. They were looking for supplies, and more Omegas - always more Omegas - but an Alpha wasn't a bad consolation prize. A girl Alpha is of no personal use to Immortan Joe, but that didn’t mean Furiosa couldn’t be used. She's been sent out to stud a time or two - for male Omegas at the Bullet Farm, the occasional Beta in heat - and she’s proved herself as an Imperator.

The echelons of the Citadel are all Alphas. The War Boys and Pups are Alphas and Betas. The city is a teeming mass of everything else - sick Alphas and Betas, a few older Omegas, the small minority of unaligned.  
  
  


| |

He’s beautiful, without the mask on his face, but that helps nothing.

| |

She doesn't see the Wives often. Not around Joe's ruts, as infrequent as they've become, and not around the collective heats the Wives sink into.

If Immortan were smarter, she’s often thought, he’d keep the Wives separate. Spread the heats out, increase his chances of seeding children. But he’s as much a fool as any Alpha - pleased by a harem who desperately call for him.

Today she is allowed among the Wives, and they flock to her as they always do, desperate for news, for new things.

"You stink," Toast is the first to say. "Stink like Omega."

"Immortan Joe gave me one," Furiosa says.

"A wife?"

The Dag scoffs, and bites off a piece of thread. "Joe would've kept her."

"A husband."

"Pretty?"

"Pretty enough, apparently." Toast, again.

“What’s he like?” Splendid, this time.

Broken. Feral.

“He's not happy,” Furiosa says, and some of the wives laugh and some of them sigh. Why should he be? What's there to be happy about?

“He'll be alright," she adds. A dozen more sentences sit in her chest. I’m not. He’s not. I wouldn’t. But the wives nod along as if they already know.

| |

Gradually routine emerges.

Fool sleeps on the floor by her bed. Fool accompanies her to breakfast. During the day he is allowed in all the spaces between their room and the kitchen, then slowly into some of the rooms the War Boys overrun. He becomes friends with Nux, a Beta, which Furiosa allows under his Alpha Slit’s watchful eyes -- no one would tangle with that one willingly, and so Fool is safe. He says one word, then two. Short bursts that aren’t quite sentences. He starts to look rested. Filled out.

Still Fool grates at the walls, at the restrictions. Too often she’s caught him looking out the window across the vastness of desert. Too often do his limbs twitch as if gearing up for action. He still rarely sleeps through the night, and he appears to prefer napping often, quickly, here and there. She tries not to hear what he mutters and grunts when he does.

She comes to feel bad for calling him Fool, but there is no other name. She would not pry it from him.

| |

She’s heading into her rut.

It’s been a long time since the last one. In her childhood - before, in the Green Place - ruts came with the seasons, as reliable as the rains, as welcome and easily weathered. Here life is harder. Easier for her than most, and still it is hard. It's been at least a year.

There’s nothing to be done, she realizes. No place she can hide Fool, no place she can hide herself that wouldn’t end with her tracking him down, or raising the kind of questions that would get them killed, if Immortan Joe even bothered to ask.

She’ll tell him. She’ll warn him. She’ll bring food and grog, as much and as strong as she can find, whether he’d prefer it for him or for her.

  


 

| |

“I’m too old,” he says the next morning. He’d gone to the kitchens and gotten breakfast for them both. Her bite is stark on his neck, settled under the collar she’d yanked roughly aside. "To breed."

Is that supposed to be comforting? Or is it supposed to disappoint her? Displease her? She’s not precisely young herself.

"Not much of a chance, no,” she says finally. A child, in the citadel. In this horrorshow of a world. No.

She remembers it happening often in the Green Place. Omegas and Betas alike - pregnant and nursing and curled around children. Perhaps that’s only the trick of memory, that there were so many. She tries not to think of the Bullet Farm, of the children there who might be hers. There must be some, she knows. Furiosa deserves to be well-rewarded, but Immortan Joe wouldn’t waste an omega on someone who couldn’t breed him.

| |

Immortan Joe calls them to war, and her first thought turns to Fool.

She wonders about leaving him at the Citadel for such a long time. Fool can take care of himself, she knows - their first fight alone proved that. She could lock him in the room. Arm him. Anyone who tried to break in and steal him would have a nasty surprise. But he could be overpowered in a small space. He could try and run, without her there to settle him.

Part of owning property in the Citadel is showing you have enough clout to keep it. Fool is too valuable to be left. Too tempting.

She wonders, then, if he could be trusted with the Wives. Kept safe, with the Wives. If she could convince Immortan Joe it would be alright. Fool is a man, yes, but an Omega, surely just another Omega….

No. Fool has to come with her, she decides. Riding alongside in the War Rig.

| |

There's something wild in his eyes, even chained to the door. Something that's come alive. 

She watches him twice as hard as she ever has, in the desert, but he does nothing.

| |

They are on the way back when Fool goes into heat.

Furiosa kicks herself for not expecting it. Kicks herself for taking Fool on the road with them, even as she knows it’s the only thing to have done.

She slows and pulls the horn; one of the Gigahorses pulls up alongside.

“He’s in heat,” she says shortly, and the War Boy in the passenger’s side chortles. “Send up a signal--”

“Perimeter, patrol,” he says, waving her off. “Got it.” This isn’t the first time something like this has happened on the road. Alphas go into rut; even Betas can go into heat. You adapt. You survive. “Need anything?”

She shakes her head. They have water, and mother’s milk, and on a rig there’s always oil.

| |

It’s somewhere in Day Two, in one of the quiet moments when Fool is curled up and sleeping in the backseat that Furiosa realizes _if there were ever a time to leave, this is it._

It isn’t that the thought hadn’t occurred to her before. The War Rig has enough supplies to get them across the desert. Being out affords them the opportunity. But a War Rig should have two to man it, at least, and Furiosa’d never even thought to confide in someone else from the Citadel before. Not the War Boys, most of whom have been born and bred in Immortan Joe’s bullshit. Not the Wives, if she could even have gotten them out.

Maybe now, she thinks. Maybe here, maybe him.

She’ll ask in the morning, or the next. When his heat breaks. Ask if he wants the chance to run, even though she thinks she already knows the answer.


End file.
